Monthly Archives: February 2012

I found myself recently in the awkward situation of replacing all the groups my user was part of, with a group I wanted to append to.
Due to the fact that I have installed VirtualBox, my user needed to be part of the vboxusers group. All good I thought, so I wanted to add that group to my user.

I have realised that I forgot to add the append option. So actually to add the new group to the existing list of groups.
The correct command would have been:

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers myuser

After my reboot, because the effect of the command is not visible until a logout/login is performed, I have found myself without sudo/admin rights. The result of the command:

groups

was myuser and vboxusers. Great, no admin rights.

So here is what I did to solve this problem.

Boot up from the LiveCD. Hope you have one at hand. Doesn’t have to be the latest distribution.

Open the terminal and mount your root:

sudo mount /dev/sda1/mnt
sudo chroot /mnt

Note: instead of sda1 you should use the partition on which your root is mounted. If you are not sure about it, check in Disk Utility application (the default one on your liveCD.

Locate the groups:

cd /mnt/etc

The file which holds the groups is simply called group. But because you have recently changed this file with the wrong command, you need to check the backup file in order to determine which were your old groups, so that you can add them back. The backup file is group-.

Now, you have 2 options to go forward. The first one is to manually edit the group file to add your user against the groups (take the back-up file as an example). The second option is to simply re-add the groups to your user with the usermod command. This way you learn the right format of the command:

What if you want to add a new application in the “Open With Other Application…” section? Maybe you want to add that particular application as the default application to open certain type of files.
Here is an example of how I can add Vim as an option to open a text file. Vim will open the file in a new terminal session.

An .desktop file needs to be created in ~/.local/share/applications
So, let’s use vim for this purpose, it is just appropriate.